Spain is a spacial country for TransparentBusiness.
Both founders of the company used to live there.
Ambassador Costos, one of our five Board members, represented the United States in Spain.
Telefonica, the second largest company in Spain, as become our shareholder and reseller.
And the Spanish media has been regularly reporting on our progress.
Today, I’m pleased to share with you a new article just published in Spanish business publication.
English translation follows below.
Spain - El Referente
TransparentBusiness
June 7, 2020
TransparentBusiness was created in 2008 by KMGi Group, founded in New York in 1997 and internationally recognized for its online innovations. The company believes in the power of technology to level the playing field of opportunity, build bridges, shorten distances and allow millions of people to work wherever they want.
They also bet on transparency as a value, and that is that their platform solves the most common problems in outsourcing and teleworking: it increases productivity, avoids over-invoicing, allows coordination and monitoring and provides real-time information on cost and status of all tasks and projects.
Silvina Moschini, founder and President of TransparentBusiness, is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur focused on digital transformation of the world of work and also founder of SheWorks!, a marketplace for hiring professional women with flexible models. Silvina is a LinkedIn influencer, a group of 500 world personalities including Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington. SheWorks is part of the World Economic Forum's collaborators agenda and, in 2019, it received the Equals in Tech award, the United Nations initiative that recognizes technological initiatives that impact sustainable development goals for their work to close the gap in gender unemployment through technology.
Today, the company is part of Wayra, Telefónica's open innovation hub.Your solution allows talent management or considerably increases productivity, why is there reluctance to telework?
The issue of resistance was a thing of the past and was based on mistrust of the challenges that remote work brings. Now, however, with the pandemic, remote work has become the norm and the opportunity to ensure business continuity for companies that would otherwise be at risk of disappearing.
The key to making remote work programs work is that technology and processes are used to solve the challenges associated with managing distributed teams that are lack of trust, coordination difficulties, and accountability.
Trust is achieved using technology that allows verification of the work process and dedicated effort, replacing the process of monitoring the natural person in an office towards monitoring the work process.
Our solution offers the necessary tools to carry out remote work with transparency and verification of the work carried out by the team and breaks down all the barriers and fears that CEOs and supervisors may have with remote work. It solves three key issues for managing remote teams: trust, distributed work coordination, and team engagement.
In this context, we help companies around the world to enter remote work and do it effectively. We offer webinars and in a short time we will launch the CloudWorking Academy so that leaders and supervisors incorporate all the technology and tools necessary to manage distributed teams successfully.
The challenge is to break with current paradigms so that work is synonymous with something that is done and not a place where one goes. Transparency, clear definition of objectives and deadline for delivery are the keys to achieving teamwork coordination and individual compliance.Following the COVID-19 crisis, there are thousands of companies that have had to resort to telecommuting on a mandatory basis. What will the post-COVID19 scenario be like in this regard? What advantages will it bring?
The expansion of the coronavirus forced more than 3.9 billion people, half of the planet's population, to remain at home to prevent the spread. With this, for thousands of companies remote work is the only option to continue operating.
The coronavirus is testing the real effectiveness of remote work. There will be a “before” and “after” for companies. Despite the regrettable situation, it is an opportunity to experience the benefits of remote work for companies and employees, by proposing flexible and transparent work schemes.
This crisis will accelerate the implementation of remote job models. It will not be easy "the day after" but we believe that this pandemic teaches us that what was long the companies' plan B can be established as the main form of work because teleworking with transparency and technology increases productivity by up to 40%, in addition to saving costs in infrastructure and transportation of people to and from their workplaces.
In fact, a Gartner report reveals that 74% of CFOs consider sending some employees to work remotely permanently after COVID 2019.
This context is the perfect storm for companies to redefine their work processes and incorporate technology and tools to optimize the management of their distributed teams.What are the first steps to digitize work?
This crisis caused thousands of companies to send their employees to work at home abruptly to preserve their health. However, most do not know how to manage their teams efficiently. The use of technology is crucial because not having the right processes and tools would be like piloting an airplane without instruments.
As the founder and president of a company that not only helps other companies to implement remote work programs but we are also remote-first, which means that we do not work in offices and our entire workforce is distributed from day one, For remote work to be efficient and productive, we believe that supervisors and leaders should focus on four pillars:
The reality is that no one is prepared for a pandemic and a business continuity crisis of this magnitude. The companies have already made the decision to send their employees home, articulating some communication processes. But as it has been proven with companies that have implemented telework programs in the past - such as Hewlett Packard or Yahoo - they ended up canceling them because if there is no technological support and processes that allow bringing transparency for the verification of distributed work management and a structure to organize remote work it is very difficult that this can work in scale and so abruptly.
The biggest challenges companies face in managing remote work are trust, commitment, and accountability. Overcoming them will be key to successfully managing distributed teams.
Digitizing the working models makes the axis move from monitoring the physical presence of people to monitoring the work done. Transparency is the basis for building a successful teleworking policy for both supervisors and leaders and collaborators.
In addition to taking advantage of technology, managing human resources is key: creating a work culture with clear rules, clear objectives, reporting mechanisms and availability expectations.
Communication is very important because in a company that implements remote work, there are no longer physical meetings in offices, but face-to-face is through video conferences by WebEx, for example.
Working collaboratively to optimize time is another axis because you are no longer in the office going to your colleague's desk to help her on the project she is working on. Google Docs works very well for us for absolutely everything we do. It is a very simple tool, easy to use and we all see the progress of documents in real time. If someone wants to share a document, instead of using attachments with different versions, you just send the link and there you can review it.
Telecommuting works successfully when you take advantage of all the good that technology provides to manage and build a culture of remote work with transparency.How does your proposal benefit the workers?
TransparentBusiness proposes a new management model. Unlike other platforms and forms of work, the user can start or stop it depending on the availability of their time.
People save time and money on transfers. They have greater flexibility to manage time and work at times that feel more productive, take more breaks and have more peace of mind. Remote work allows those groups that cannot or do not attend the office for 8 hours, such as mothers, people with mobility difficulties and the elderly, to re-enter the labor market and have their opportunity for development.
TransparentBusiness allows people from different parts of the world to work for companies without leaving their homes: a person in Spain, for example, can export their talent to Latin America and vice versa. Our platform allows employees to have a balanced personal and professional life and especially women to combine motherhood and childcare with a challenging profession that makes them feel happy, thereby helping to retain and summon talent that otherwise it would not be available in the market.How does the relationship between them and the company improve?
Remote work serves as an equalizer of opportunities because it breaks geographic barriers and allows economic and professional development for people.
It is a scheme in which everyone wins, companies are no longer limited by their location when hiring and the people who can export their talent to the world.
People who live in remote places can access flexible opportunities and from the place they are, through the computer. Transparency generates job opportunities even in places where they do not exist today, brings confidence through monitoring the work done, focusing on the work process and not on the physical presence of people.How do companies adapt according to their size and what role do you play?
No matter the size of the company, remote work can be successfully applied by large companies, SMEs, NGOs and government entities from anywhere in the world, provided they focus on technologies for transparency and the definition of work processes.
TransparentBusiness is a Cloud-based solution that provides transparency and verification in the coordination of remote work teams. It provides traceability to leaders and supervisors of all the tasks and projects of each employee regardless of their geographical location.
We solve the challenges of remote work management that are coordination, trust and accountability with technology that allows verification of the work process and dedicated effort, replacing monitoring the physical presence of a person in an office towards the monitoring of the work process.What’s the origin of Transparent Business?
We founded TransparentBusiness in response to a need we had as entrepreneurs to manage our distributed team more efficiently. We had more than 300 collaborators located in different places such as Ukraine, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the USA. In the midst of the 2008 crisis, we were forced to rethink how to make our operations more efficient.
We created a technology that would allow us to bring transparency and visibility to the work we were doing as a team with each of our collaborators. The objective was to create a solution that benefited both employees and employers and that solved the great dilemmas that threatened the implementation of teleworking and outsourcing or outsourcing: lack of control, over-invoicing, loss of productivity.
After 3 years of using it with great success to manage our team, we decided to develop a commercial version to offer the license to companies that were interested in implementing telework transparently.And the reception? What impressions do you collect from those who work with you?
We have nearly 9000 clients distributed in 172 countries. The main response of our clients when asked about the benefits of our solution, refers to the fact that they managed to open their range of hiring by being able to access talent from anywhere in the world and have a complete follow-up of the tasks performed by each person.
At this point, it allows you to expand your hires outside of a specific physical space or border, thus helping to choose people for their talent and performance and not simply for their geographical location.
With Everis, for example, we are working in Colombia on a project to create clouds of talent for women and also with SENA (Colombian National Apprenticeship Service) that trains young people in digital skills and then connects them with job opportunities through our platform.
We are doing something similar in Ecuador, we are working on a certification plan together with Google and AWS with young technology students who, after becoming certified, will work through our solution.In what concrete way does telework empower women?
McKinsey reveals that closing the gender gap would inject $ 12 trillion into global GDP by 2025. Technology democratizes access to work because people can show themselves to the world by how they work and not by who they are. It breaks down the barriers that separate talent from opportunities, allows flexible work models and evolve towards models where work is something that is done and not a place where one goes. Today 51% of women with children leave work when they become mothers due to rigid and obsolete schemes.
Our team is made up of exceptional women who today are developing their professional careers thanks to this new paradigm. For example, Maricruz Tabbia, part of our team for more than five years, is a mother who lives in Franck, a town of 5,500 inhabitants in Santa Fe, and works for companies like Google in Mountain View from her home.
With remote work, we can ensure that there are many Maricruz who do not have to mobilize towards opportunities but can be with their children and develop their careers without this being an impediment.What is the key to reaching more than 172 countries? What makes your project an initiative to trust?
Our solution is a turnkey platform in which not only serves to coordinate remote work with transparency, but leaders and supervisors can access a work room that brings the entire team together in one place, see the work diary of each one of the employees, with integrated chat to send files and to talk and a functionality to make video calls.
For the coordinators and leaders, it is a platform that gives traceability of all the work done: with Gantt diagrams, intelligent reports to control the budget and make visible deviations of hours invested in each assigned task, which talent used the most hours, among other things.
This is why with the expansion of the coronavirus, we had an explosion of demand from companies to implement telework effectively and also from companies interested in the commercialization of our platform. Because if we want remote work models to work successfully, it is necessary to have tools that help us monitor the entire work process.To get to where you are, you have had many supports, to what extent has Wayra's support in particular helped you?
We are proud to be part of the Wayra family. It gives us a great impetus to continue and a guarantee and scope because a company like Telefónica, number one in the telecommunications market and with a presence in Europe and Latin America, is betting on the future of working with transparency by supporting a solution like ours not only as our investor but as our distribution partner to bring TransparentBusiness remote work solutions to market.
Wayra's investment will help us develop business with Telefónica by capitalizing on the group's network of more than 350 million customers around the world. We will also have global access to the investor community and the Wayra and Telefónica ecosystem in Latin America and Europe.How have your medium / long term goals changed in the last month?
In recent weeks, we have been contacted by many companies from different areas in search of a solution to manage their remote equipment as well as companies interested in marketing our platform.
In this current context where thousands of companies are forced to implement remote work with no other option, we seek to help organizations of all sizes in managing remote work and that is why we launched CloudWorking Academy, an initiative that we carry out since TransparentBusiness in collaboration with Telefónica, Wayra, Cisco Systems, IDB, everis and Citrix is an academy for business leaders to successfully manage their virtual teams. We offer a free four-week program that features international experts in the world of digital transformation.What are your priorities now?
We have many projects ahead. We started with CloudWorking Academy to train organizations of all kinds for free in the successful management of remote work and accompany companies of all sizes in the transition between a physical office and a virtual office.
Clearly the coronavirus was an accelerator in remote work. Our year will continue with more alliances to accelerate the implementation of transparent remote working models in organizations because we believe that remote working will be the main way of working and we will be there to help companies on this path.
They also bet on transparency as a value, and that is that their platform solves the most common problems in outsourcing and teleworking: it increases productivity, avoids over-invoicing, allows coordination and monitoring and provides real-time information on cost and status of all tasks and projects.
Silvina Moschini, founder and President of TransparentBusiness, is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur focused on digital transformation of the world of work and also founder of SheWorks!, a marketplace for hiring professional women with flexible models. Silvina is a LinkedIn influencer, a group of 500 world personalities including Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington. SheWorks is part of the World Economic Forum's collaborators agenda and, in 2019, it received the Equals in Tech award, the United Nations initiative that recognizes technological initiatives that impact sustainable development goals for their work to close the gap in gender unemployment through technology.
Today, the company is part of Wayra, Telefónica's open innovation hub.Your solution allows talent management or considerably increases productivity, why is there reluctance to telework?
The issue of resistance was a thing of the past and was based on mistrust of the challenges that remote work brings. Now, however, with the pandemic, remote work has become the norm and the opportunity to ensure business continuity for companies that would otherwise be at risk of disappearing.
The key to making remote work programs work is that technology and processes are used to solve the challenges associated with managing distributed teams that are lack of trust, coordination difficulties, and accountability.
Trust is achieved using technology that allows verification of the work process and dedicated effort, replacing the process of monitoring the natural person in an office towards monitoring the work process.
Our solution offers the necessary tools to carry out remote work with transparency and verification of the work carried out by the team and breaks down all the barriers and fears that CEOs and supervisors may have with remote work. It solves three key issues for managing remote teams: trust, distributed work coordination, and team engagement.
In this context, we help companies around the world to enter remote work and do it effectively. We offer webinars and in a short time we will launch the CloudWorking Academy so that leaders and supervisors incorporate all the technology and tools necessary to manage distributed teams successfully.
The challenge is to break with current paradigms so that work is synonymous with something that is done and not a place where one goes. Transparency, clear definition of objectives and deadline for delivery are the keys to achieving teamwork coordination and individual compliance.Following the COVID-19 crisis, there are thousands of companies that have had to resort to telecommuting on a mandatory basis. What will the post-COVID19 scenario be like in this regard? What advantages will it bring?
The expansion of the coronavirus forced more than 3.9 billion people, half of the planet's population, to remain at home to prevent the spread. With this, for thousands of companies remote work is the only option to continue operating.
The coronavirus is testing the real effectiveness of remote work. There will be a “before” and “after” for companies. Despite the regrettable situation, it is an opportunity to experience the benefits of remote work for companies and employees, by proposing flexible and transparent work schemes.
This crisis will accelerate the implementation of remote job models. It will not be easy "the day after" but we believe that this pandemic teaches us that what was long the companies' plan B can be established as the main form of work because teleworking with transparency and technology increases productivity by up to 40%, in addition to saving costs in infrastructure and transportation of people to and from their workplaces.
In fact, a Gartner report reveals that 74% of CFOs consider sending some employees to work remotely permanently after COVID 2019.
This context is the perfect storm for companies to redefine their work processes and incorporate technology and tools to optimize the management of their distributed teams.What are the first steps to digitize work?
This crisis caused thousands of companies to send their employees to work at home abruptly to preserve their health. However, most do not know how to manage their teams efficiently. The use of technology is crucial because not having the right processes and tools would be like piloting an airplane without instruments.
As the founder and president of a company that not only helps other companies to implement remote work programs but we are also remote-first, which means that we do not work in offices and our entire workforce is distributed from day one, For remote work to be efficient and productive, we believe that supervisors and leaders should focus on four pillars:
- Use technology for transparency and verification in the work process.
One of the most common resistances to remote work is the fear of not being able to control whether an employee is actually working or doing other things during work hours. This lack of trust can be solved with technological tools specially designed to verify the work process, which replaces the monitoring of individuals in an office with the monitoring of their performance and results. - Give instructions and establish clear work processes.
Generating frequent follow-up meetings strengthens the bond between leaders and their teams. The market offers infinite tools for collaborative online work, but for the best articulation of projects it is important that each person knows what tasks they have to carry out and that the entire team is aligned with the final objective. - Create culture and community.
Generate spaces and activities in virtual rooms so that the distributed workforce has that sense of belonging, even being thousands of kilometers away. The new face-to-face is Zoom or Skype video conferencing, which helps avoid isolation, encourages collaboration and builds team spirit. - Manage talent.
Technology is a great facilitator, because it allows access to the best talent wherever it is, it gives us all the same opportunities. Companies that implement teleworking can access and recruit the most suitable people in the world for their teams.
The reality is that no one is prepared for a pandemic and a business continuity crisis of this magnitude. The companies have already made the decision to send their employees home, articulating some communication processes. But as it has been proven with companies that have implemented telework programs in the past - such as Hewlett Packard or Yahoo - they ended up canceling them because if there is no technological support and processes that allow bringing transparency for the verification of distributed work management and a structure to organize remote work it is very difficult that this can work in scale and so abruptly.
The biggest challenges companies face in managing remote work are trust, commitment, and accountability. Overcoming them will be key to successfully managing distributed teams.
Digitizing the working models makes the axis move from monitoring the physical presence of people to monitoring the work done. Transparency is the basis for building a successful teleworking policy for both supervisors and leaders and collaborators.
In addition to taking advantage of technology, managing human resources is key: creating a work culture with clear rules, clear objectives, reporting mechanisms and availability expectations.
Communication is very important because in a company that implements remote work, there are no longer physical meetings in offices, but face-to-face is through video conferences by WebEx, for example.
Working collaboratively to optimize time is another axis because you are no longer in the office going to your colleague's desk to help her on the project she is working on. Google Docs works very well for us for absolutely everything we do. It is a very simple tool, easy to use and we all see the progress of documents in real time. If someone wants to share a document, instead of using attachments with different versions, you just send the link and there you can review it.
Telecommuting works successfully when you take advantage of all the good that technology provides to manage and build a culture of remote work with transparency.How does your proposal benefit the workers?
TransparentBusiness proposes a new management model. Unlike other platforms and forms of work, the user can start or stop it depending on the availability of their time.
People save time and money on transfers. They have greater flexibility to manage time and work at times that feel more productive, take more breaks and have more peace of mind. Remote work allows those groups that cannot or do not attend the office for 8 hours, such as mothers, people with mobility difficulties and the elderly, to re-enter the labor market and have their opportunity for development.
TransparentBusiness allows people from different parts of the world to work for companies without leaving their homes: a person in Spain, for example, can export their talent to Latin America and vice versa. Our platform allows employees to have a balanced personal and professional life and especially women to combine motherhood and childcare with a challenging profession that makes them feel happy, thereby helping to retain and summon talent that otherwise it would not be available in the market.How does the relationship between them and the company improve?
Remote work serves as an equalizer of opportunities because it breaks geographic barriers and allows economic and professional development for people.
It is a scheme in which everyone wins, companies are no longer limited by their location when hiring and the people who can export their talent to the world.
People who live in remote places can access flexible opportunities and from the place they are, through the computer. Transparency generates job opportunities even in places where they do not exist today, brings confidence through monitoring the work done, focusing on the work process and not on the physical presence of people.How do companies adapt according to their size and what role do you play?
No matter the size of the company, remote work can be successfully applied by large companies, SMEs, NGOs and government entities from anywhere in the world, provided they focus on technologies for transparency and the definition of work processes.
TransparentBusiness is a Cloud-based solution that provides transparency and verification in the coordination of remote work teams. It provides traceability to leaders and supervisors of all the tasks and projects of each employee regardless of their geographical location.
We solve the challenges of remote work management that are coordination, trust and accountability with technology that allows verification of the work process and dedicated effort, replacing monitoring the physical presence of a person in an office towards the monitoring of the work process.What’s the origin of Transparent Business?
We founded TransparentBusiness in response to a need we had as entrepreneurs to manage our distributed team more efficiently. We had more than 300 collaborators located in different places such as Ukraine, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the USA. In the midst of the 2008 crisis, we were forced to rethink how to make our operations more efficient.
We created a technology that would allow us to bring transparency and visibility to the work we were doing as a team with each of our collaborators. The objective was to create a solution that benefited both employees and employers and that solved the great dilemmas that threatened the implementation of teleworking and outsourcing or outsourcing: lack of control, over-invoicing, loss of productivity.
After 3 years of using it with great success to manage our team, we decided to develop a commercial version to offer the license to companies that were interested in implementing telework transparently.And the reception? What impressions do you collect from those who work with you?
We have nearly 9000 clients distributed in 172 countries. The main response of our clients when asked about the benefits of our solution, refers to the fact that they managed to open their range of hiring by being able to access talent from anywhere in the world and have a complete follow-up of the tasks performed by each person.
At this point, it allows you to expand your hires outside of a specific physical space or border, thus helping to choose people for their talent and performance and not simply for their geographical location.
With Everis, for example, we are working in Colombia on a project to create clouds of talent for women and also with SENA (Colombian National Apprenticeship Service) that trains young people in digital skills and then connects them with job opportunities through our platform.
We are doing something similar in Ecuador, we are working on a certification plan together with Google and AWS with young technology students who, after becoming certified, will work through our solution.In what concrete way does telework empower women?
McKinsey reveals that closing the gender gap would inject $ 12 trillion into global GDP by 2025. Technology democratizes access to work because people can show themselves to the world by how they work and not by who they are. It breaks down the barriers that separate talent from opportunities, allows flexible work models and evolve towards models where work is something that is done and not a place where one goes. Today 51% of women with children leave work when they become mothers due to rigid and obsolete schemes.
Our team is made up of exceptional women who today are developing their professional careers thanks to this new paradigm. For example, Maricruz Tabbia, part of our team for more than five years, is a mother who lives in Franck, a town of 5,500 inhabitants in Santa Fe, and works for companies like Google in Mountain View from her home.
With remote work, we can ensure that there are many Maricruz who do not have to mobilize towards opportunities but can be with their children and develop their careers without this being an impediment.What is the key to reaching more than 172 countries? What makes your project an initiative to trust?
Our solution is a turnkey platform in which not only serves to coordinate remote work with transparency, but leaders and supervisors can access a work room that brings the entire team together in one place, see the work diary of each one of the employees, with integrated chat to send files and to talk and a functionality to make video calls.
For the coordinators and leaders, it is a platform that gives traceability of all the work done: with Gantt diagrams, intelligent reports to control the budget and make visible deviations of hours invested in each assigned task, which talent used the most hours, among other things.
This is why with the expansion of the coronavirus, we had an explosion of demand from companies to implement telework effectively and also from companies interested in the commercialization of our platform. Because if we want remote work models to work successfully, it is necessary to have tools that help us monitor the entire work process.To get to where you are, you have had many supports, to what extent has Wayra's support in particular helped you?
We are proud to be part of the Wayra family. It gives us a great impetus to continue and a guarantee and scope because a company like Telefónica, number one in the telecommunications market and with a presence in Europe and Latin America, is betting on the future of working with transparency by supporting a solution like ours not only as our investor but as our distribution partner to bring TransparentBusiness remote work solutions to market.
Wayra's investment will help us develop business with Telefónica by capitalizing on the group's network of more than 350 million customers around the world. We will also have global access to the investor community and the Wayra and Telefónica ecosystem in Latin America and Europe.How have your medium / long term goals changed in the last month?
In recent weeks, we have been contacted by many companies from different areas in search of a solution to manage their remote equipment as well as companies interested in marketing our platform.
In this current context where thousands of companies are forced to implement remote work with no other option, we seek to help organizations of all sizes in managing remote work and that is why we launched CloudWorking Academy, an initiative that we carry out since TransparentBusiness in collaboration with Telefónica, Wayra, Cisco Systems, IDB, everis and Citrix is an academy for business leaders to successfully manage their virtual teams. We offer a free four-week program that features international experts in the world of digital transformation.What are your priorities now?
We have many projects ahead. We started with CloudWorking Academy to train organizations of all kinds for free in the successful management of remote work and accompany companies of all sizes in the transition between a physical office and a virtual office.
Clearly the coronavirus was an accelerator in remote work. Our year will continue with more alliances to accelerate the implementation of transparent remote working models in organizations because we believe that remote working will be the main way of working and we will be there to help companies on this path.